Pence is the last 'step before you approach Trump': Former FBI agent says
Legal experts came together with MSNBC's Joy Reid on Thursday to talk about the significance of special counsel Jack Smith subpoenaing former Vice President Mike Pence.
Civil Rights lawyer Charles Coleman walked through some of the questions that Smith will probably ask. He explained that it became clear that Pence knew that the attempt to overthrow the election by refusing to accept the electoral college votes wasn't legal.
"No. 1: the question becomes what did he know and how early did he know it?" Coleman asked. "All of that information is what Jack Smith is looking to get and going to be extremely valuable. But I want to make another point I talked about on a number of platforms. When you come for the king, you cannot miss. One of the things about Jack Smith's investigation is he's going to the very top to try to get as much credible information from people who were in the know in order to be able to try this case eventually."
He said that if he was Smith, he would look at who could give the most credible information before a jury who would also know the most about what Trump knew and when he knew it. There's no one better, he explained, than Mike Pence.
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But it was former FBI agent Peter Strzok who made it clear Pence is "pretty much the last step before you approach Trump."
Pence, he explained, was present for several of the meetings where Trump and his political advisers were trying to come up with a strategy to overturn the election.
During the Jan. 4 and 5 meeting, Strzok recalled that John Eastman reportedly told Trump about the fake electors' scheme and that certain states should be "set aside" or delayed. That's when the question was posed about whether it was lawful. Pence wrote about the moment in his own book where even Eastman agreed that it would never hold up in court, even at the Supreme Court.
"The reason that's important is if Trump is going to try and claim that he acted on the basis of the advice of counsel, you need to know what those discussions were in terms of saying is this lawful, isn't it?" he continued. "The reason we know about all those conversations is that Mike Pence ran an editorial at the beginning of November last year about all of these meetings in advance of his book coming out where he talked about all that."
"You can't very well go into a grand jury and claim executive privilege when everything you're trying to claim privilege [about] is something you talked about in your book and in the Wall Street Journal three months ago. I think these are absolutely critical discussions that are really going to show not only where Pence might have been a victim but also explore those areas where Trump might try to use his defenses to any sort of charge."
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